Although it most famously appeared during the 17th century as a means for facilitating transatlantic migration and providing labor in England’s early American colonies, indentured servitude has manifested itself in many forms during its long history. Indentured servants were individuals who bargained away their labor for a period of four to seven years in exchange for passage to the New World. In the 17th century, indentured servants made up the mass of English immigrants to the Chesapeake colonies and were central to the development of the tobacco economy. Large numbers of indentured servants could also be found in the English West Indian colonies, but they were replaced by enslaved African laborers by the end of the century as cash-crop agriculture (particularly sugar) and plantation slavery gradually minimized the overall demographic and economic importance of indentured servitude as a labor system. Regardless, indentured servitude continued to be an important institution in the Atlantic world through the 19th century. Debates persist about the general characteristics of early indentured servants, but they were certainly primarily younger English men in search of new opportunities for wealth and advancement that were unavailable to them at home. Some people achieved this goal, but many more either died before their contract expired or were unable to rise above a relatively moderate status in the colonies. In the 17th century, most indentured servants were of English origin and migrated to the Chesapeake and West Indies. Of the 120,000 emigrants to the Chesapeake during this era, roughly 90,000 arrived as bound laborers. Another 50,000 to 75,000 white indentured servants went to the islands, although these numbers included many Irish servants, political prisoners, and convict laborers. A few indentured servants, or engagés, appeared in the French colonies, but the institution was much more common in the British colonies. Indentured servitude did eventually become much more diverse, particularly during the 18th century when increasing numbers of German redemptioners arrived and an increasing percentage of people chose to locate themselves in nonplantation zones, especially Pennsylvania. Perhaps 150,000 non-English migrants arrived as servants during the late colonial period. After the American Revolution, however, the system virtually disappeared in the United States. In the West Indies, however, indentured servitude revived in many places after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and 1840s. During the 19th century, large numbers of Indian and Chinese migrant laborers were bound into servitude to perform tasks once the responsibility of enslaved Africans. Scholars disagree about whether or not this new system was simply a new form of slavery. Regardless, as late as the first decades of the 20th century, unfree laborers—effectively the descendants of the mass of indentured servants who first appeared nearly four hundred years earlier—could still be found toiling in subjugation in the old plantation zones of North America and the Caribbean. Show Samuel Miller apprenticeship indenture, 1805, courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society. Samuel Stent Miller apprenticed himself to Gabriel Manigault Bounetheau, a Charleston, South Carolina printer, for a period of five years. Gabriel Manigault Bounetheau was a Justice of the Peace, Clerk of Council, and a printer with an office at 3 Broad Street, according to the Charleston City Directory of 1806. Until the early eighteenth century, the majority of Europeans who came to the Americas were not free settlers or elite landholders. They were indentured servants. In exchange for the cost of ship passage across the Atlantic, men and women from throughout Western Europe came to the Americas to work in a range of labor roles, from skilled trades to plantation agriculture. To pay for the cost of their travel, indentured servants worked for several years for a contract holder who did not pay wages, but did provide housing, food, and clothing. Similar to enslaved American Indians and Africans, indentured servants could have their contracts sold at market to different bidders, could be physically punished, and in some contexts, servants were not allowed to marry or have children without the permission of their contract holder. Labor and disease conditions for early colonial indentured servants were also brutal, and many died before the end of their contract. Attempting to flee their servitude could lead to punishment and added years to their contract. In addition, while many indentured servants came willingly to the Americas due to periods of low wages and poor living conditions in Western Europe, significant numbers were also kidnapped, or transported as convict labor Despite some similarities to enslavement, indentured servants ultimately attained their freedom once they completed their contract, while enslaved people were permanently denied their freedom unless they could obtain the means to purchase themselves or successfully escape. In addition, in the seventeenth century various European colonies established laws ensuring that the offspring of enslaved women inherited their legal status from their mother, even if their father was free. Although intermarriage and sexual relationships between free European women and enslaved African or American Indian men did occur (particularly during early settlement), social stigmas and white male-dominated race and gender hierarchies meant that many interracial sexual relationships, both forced and willing, occurred between free or indentured European men and enslaved African or American Indian women. For this reason, a law linking enslavement to the mother's status effectively made slavery inheritable in the Americas.  Spaniard and Mulatto, painting by Miguel Cabrera, 1763, courtesy of the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania. For European indentured servants, the guarantee of eventual freedom was significant, but many still collaborated with enslaved Africans and American Indians to run away, resist cruel treatment from shared masters, or to form rebellions. The close proximity of social status sometimes led to intermarriage between European indentured servants and enslaved Africans, and the exchange of cultural traditions and skills in the form of food, music, spirituality, and craft. Such interaction, including forced and willing sexual relationships, also occurred between elite slaveholding whites and enslaved people, but these relationships operated within the more coercive and imbalanced power dynamic of slaveholder and enslaved. By the eighteenth century, however, European indentured servants became more scarce and expensive to obtain. Fewer Europeans were willing to accept undesirable contracts in the Americas, particularly after rumors spread of the deadly conditions on American plantations. Elites in the Americas began to offer lighter labor treatment and special privileges to white indentured servants and free, non-slaveholding whites over enslaved Africans and American Indians. This extension of white racial privilege increasingly gave indentured and non-slaveholding Europeans an incentive to build stronger alliances with white elites. In exchange, slaveholding elites benefitted from a class of non-slaveholding whites who provided a protective buffer to help maintain developing race and class hierarchies in the Americas. For example, non-slaveholding whites could serve on patrols to help protect against slave rebellions, particularly as the numbers of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas increased with the continued growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Atlantic plantation economies. In regions where enslaved Africans held a numerical majority, white elites promoted multi-tiered racial hierarchies. In these areas, enslaved or free people with lighter skin tones (often due to mixed European and African or American Indian ancestry) received milder labor treatment or special privileges over dark-skinned enslaved Africans to again generate a protective buffer class to secure the institution of slavery. "The Burning of Jamestown," painting by Howard Pyle, 1905, courtesy of Canadian Libraries. During Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77), Nathanial Bacon organized Virginia settlers across race and class divisions to protest against the rule of Governor William Berkeley. On September 19, 1676, they burned the colonial capital of Jamestown, Virginia to the ground. The alliance between European indentured servants and enslaved Africans during the rebellion disturbed the ruling class, who subsequently passed laws to harden Virginia's racial caste system dividing free and indentured whites from enslaved blacks. Why were indentured servants needed in the tobacco economy?(2) Need: Tobacco was the main and most important crop in Virginia. As the plantation of tobacco spread and grew, more labor was needed, but slaves were too expensive. So because of that, landowners used indentured servants, who were those who had debts to pay, and needed to work to pay them.
What is an indentured servant and why are they important?Indentures are agreements between two parties about long-term work. The length of servitude might be a specified number of years or until the servant reached a certain age. Some people indentured themselves in order to gain passage to America or to escape debt and poverty.
What effect did tobacco have on indentured servants?Tobacco formed the basis of the colony's economy: it was used to purchase the indentured servants and slaves to cultivate it, to pay local taxes and tithes, and to buy manufactured goods from England.
What is an indentured servant and where were they used?Indentured servants were men and women who signed a contract (also known as an indenture or a covenant) by which they agreed to work for a certain number of years in exchange for transportation to Virginia and, once they arrived, food, clothing, and shelter.
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